Patell and Waterman’s History of New York
Being a … course, companion, blog, and book.
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A pest control company called Terminix lists New York, Philadelphia and Detroit as the three cities most infested with bedbugs. And apparently there’s a new bedbug-related problem: people desperate to get rid of infestations are using pesticides intended for outdoor indoors. Take a look at this Huffington Press article.
I’m getting out of Manhattan for the weekend and noticed this view on the west side of Lexington Avenue between 40th and 39th Streets while waiting for a bus. I think it embodies quite a nice bit of the history of New York.
It might make a good prompt for the exam in the “New York and Modernity” course that I’m teaching this January for NYU ABu Dhabi.
Yesterday, I wrote about reliving the 1970s in the service of my Rolling Stones book. In fact, for the past two years, many New Yorkers have lived in fear of doing just that: reliving the seventies. Ever since the economic downturn began in late 2008, New Yorkers have been petrified that the city would revisit the bad old days of the mid-1970s when New York had a brush with near-bankruptcy. (Remember: “Ford to City: Drop Dead”?)
Well here’s an unexpected way in which we seem to be reliving the 1970s. What was it the Stones sang in “Shattered”?
We got rats on the West Side, bedbugs uptown …
Now I grew up on the West Side and uptown. Yes, there were some rats, but the bugs I remember are cockroaches. Every morning, when I turned on the light in the kitchen of our prewar apartment on Riverside Drive, the little buggers would go scurrying. No amount of visits by the official exterminator seemed to help. And then my mother discovered boric acid, and the roach problem was solved.
Bedbugs, we never had. They did not loom in my imagination as I was growing up in the city in the 1970s. Not like muggers or “dog-doo” (pre-poop scoop New York, it was). But apparently the city had them. And it does again.
This time around, even the upper East Side has got ‘em, according to NBC News and New York magazine.
Bedbugs freak me out. When I heard about this article in the New York Daily News, which noted that movie theaters were a good place to pick up the critters, well, let’s just say I haven’t seen too many movies this summer.
And then, in Sunday’s New York Times, I learned this disgusting fact about bedbugs:
their sexual practices are bizarre even by insect standards: Because the female bedbug has no genital opening, the male inseminates her by using his hardened, sharpened genitalia to punch a hole through her abdomen. With no elaborate courtship ritual, males in a frenzied pursuit of sexual congress often blunder into and puncture the bodies of other males, occasionally inflicting fatal wounds.
Gross. This town’s in tatters. Uh-huh.
[Photo credit: New York magazine]
Vivien Goldman, from “To Hell & Back,” Sounds, 8 October 1977:
“I WONDER whether the bright spark who thought up the new Sire Records slogan Don’t Call It Punk realised exactly how spot on he/she was. Take a musician like Richard [Hell] – he isn’t a punk. True, he lives in a highly unsalubrious area of New York, way down on the lower east side, ideal turf for young punks to hang out on corners and shoot the shit, but Richard isn’t there because he’s a first generation American whose folks have just pulled in from Puerto Rico. He’s there because he’s one of the new generation of artist types flocking to low-rent areas, a process which will inevitably result in the rents slowly rising, the scabrous tenements being tarted up till the immigrant families can’t afford it any more and have to shift camp to somewhere even less advantageous. Right now, it’s still funky in the fullest sense of the word – mean, dirty and low down, just the kind of area your mother wouldn’t let you play in.”
Tags: Lower East Side, Richard Hell
Obscene NYC prepared the stage-by-stage “visual history of Shepard Fairey’s May Day Mural Beef,” above. If nothing else, the wall has certainly provided a lot of bloggers with fodder, even when we’re across the country on vacation. (Most recent updates from Jeremiah and Grieve; is there anything to report about the satellite installation at Music Hall of Williamsburg? Last time I was there it was still under special security.)
I still think my favorite moments at Bowery and Houston have been when the Os Gemeos mural peeked through, bristling with life. (My photo below.) This thing, according to Deitch Projects, is supposed to be up through the end of the year. I can’t imagine it surviving the summer.
Tags: Bowery, graffiti, Shepard Fairey
Our third guest at last week’s Faculty Resource Network seminar was the architectural preservationist Ward Dennis, who is a member of the firm Higgins Quasebarth & Partners, which advises private, corporate, government and institutional clients on the preservation and rehabilitation of historic properties. “Denny” is also an adjunct professor in the Historic Preservation program of Columbia University’s School of Architecture. Last spring, he taught a Historic Preservation studio course that took Corlears Hook as its study area.
For Denny, change is a fact of urban life, and as a preservationist he adopts what he regards as a “curatorial” approach that can allow a city to manage the ways in which its neighborhoods change, not simply preserving buildings from the past but also finding new uses for them. He began with what might be considered the preservationist’s conundrum, using the famous Katz’s Delicatessen as an example.
The guidebooks call Katz’s a New York landmark, but from the standpoint of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, it can’t be landmarked because it isn’t architecturally distinguished. And what is it really, that you want to preserve about Katz’s? It isn’t, Denny argued, the building: it’s the pastrami sandwich — its taste and the ambiance in which you consume it. And that’s something you can’t legislate.
Katz’s signs offer evidence of another characteristic of city life that sometimes stymies preservations: the process of accretion over time. The signs were added at different times, which in fact detracts from the potential significance of the building itself. It is much more difficult to have landmark status conferred on buildings that are substantially altered over time. Change apparently diminishes architectural significance, and architectural significance is the name of the game when it comes to landmarking.
In the afternoon, he led us on a tour of the neighborhood south of Washington Square, showing us the changing architectural styles of buildings that were once tenements, pointing out features and subtle distinguishing marks that most of us don’t notice as we walk by these buildings on a daily basis. What became clear is that the idea of Greenwich village as a Bohemian space quickly became a marketing tool for developers in the early part of the twentieth century. Many buildings were renovated so that they could be more effectively represented as artists’ spaces. The tour highlighted a concept that emerged during the week as highly problematic, often evoked as a reason to resist or promote one or another kind of urban change: the idea of authenticity.
Overall, Denny offered us a highly pragmatic approach to the task of preservation, a refreshing counterweight to the nostalgia and sometimes knee-jerk resistance to change that often accompanies accounts of “lost New York.”
When I first thought of teaching an intensive summer seminar on New York’s downtown scenes — which I just wrapped up last Friday — I planned only to teach the 1970s. Gearing up to write my 33 1/3 volume on Television’s Marquee Moon, I wanted to immerse myself in a broad range of materials from the period detailing a number of overlapping downtown arts scenes.
I quickly realized, though, that much of what I wanted to do with the 70s in class required some understanding of the area’s arts scenes in the 1960s, and so I decided to expand the timeframe to 1960-80. When the final reading list was drawn up, I’d reached back even further: I had a hunch that the work of some particular downtown arts pioneers who created seminal works in the 1950s — Allen Ginsberg and John Cage, especially — would become threads that would weave through the entire course.
Turns out I was right in both cases, but especially in Ginsberg’s. (Other people whose work proved to have lasting effects on the downtown scenes we discussed include O’Hara and Warhol.) Almost without fail, Ginsberg turned up in every day’s discussion over the course of our two weeks, either as a direct influence, a character, a mentor, or a commentator. His appearances ranged from the goofy parka-wearing, pot-smoking version of himself in Pull My Daisy to the author of Howl (which in turn authorized The Fugs’ memorable “I Saw the Best Minds of My Generation Rock”) to the prophet wandering in the background of Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” in Pennebaker’s Dont Look Back. Jonas Mekas captured him plotting with Barbara Rudin and other LES lefties in the 1960s (we watched the second reel of Walden) and as a fixture on the LES poetry scene he popped up in several of the pieces we read by our friend Daniel Kane. Ginsberg offered astute commentary on Dylan’s lyrics in a PBS documentary on the history of rock and roll. He provided a very memorable scene in Jim Carroll’s memoir Forced Entries, worked with — and claimed to deflower — the downtown composer and scene-crosser Arthur Russell, and befriended Patti Smith. He lived in the same building as both Russell and the members of Television. (Richard Hell still lives there.) In Steven Sebring’s Patti Smith: Dream of Life, which was the very last thing, along with Smith’s Just Kids, that we considered for this course, we see Patti’s very emotional reading at a Ginsberg memorial; later in the film she chants the “Footnote to Howl,” offering all the evidence anyone should need that even Ginsberg’s most idiosyncratic work holds up under someone else’s voice.
I’m still trying to work out exactly what it was that made Ginsberg’s legacy so unique in the materials we discussed. Although I opted not to show it to the class, I privately viewed a late-1980s odd-ball documentary on East Side poetry, Maria Beatty’s Gang of Souls: A Generation of Beat Poets, in which nearly every poet interviewed, including younger writers and musicians such as Richard Hell, Lydia Lunch, and Jim Carroll, singles out Ginsberg as the towering figure of twentieth-century New York writing. Cage’s influence on musicians and artists, by contrast, was subtle, almost imperceptible, though still very much in place. Perhaps Ginsberg seemed to matter because he offered such a clear model for how to make a scene and how to canonize one’s comrades. But he also seemed to matter because he was, quite simply, on the scene for so long, taking an interest in younger writers’ work (and more), offering advice, continuing to read in public. O’Hara mattered as an icon in his early death (and a pioneer of a poetics that clearly took hold among other New York School poets); O’Hara also drew young, aspiring poets to the city, but that hands-on influence was cut short. Warhol mattered as a media mastermind and behind-the-scenes manipulator. But Ginsberg just seemed to be there wherever we turned, presiding, prodding, provoking. In the history of late-twentieth-century New York writing it’s difficult, I’m finding, to come up with someone whose life and work had broader impact.
Tags: downtown scenes, Dylan, Ginsberg, O'Hara, poetry, Warhol
Today my “Downtown Scenes” class will be considering conceptual art and performance and the stirrings of minimalism in music, painting, and sculpture. Some analogies and overlaps with the world of poetry we’ve been talking about and will continue to talk about as we move into the Second Generation New York School later this week. The first two figures we spent intensive time with were Ginsberg and O’Hara. Today we’ll think about the vast influence of John Cage.
Here’s my favorite early Cage clip. I know I’ve posted it before, but in case you weren’t reading at that point — trust me. It’s worth the time:
Here’s a 2007 performance of the same piece at Brown University.
Our reading for today includes Calvin Tomkins’s seminal New Yorker profile of Cage, originally published in 1965 and later included in his book Bride and the Bachelors. It’s not the most academic take on Cage, but I wanted to use it in part to consider it as a product of the period itself: it’s chatty, gossipy, and works to create Tomkins’s persona almost as much as Cage’s. But it also allows us to think about Cage before the longevity of his influence could have been known.
Our primary text, though, is Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit, originally published in 1964 and expanded in 1970, with a new introduction by John Lennon (“Hi! My name is John Lennon / I’d like you to meet Yoko Ono”). Grapefruit is primarily a book of instructions, what some performance scholars call “event scores.” They are conceptual pieces that present themselves variously as instructions for music, dance, painting, film, or other artistic performances. Like musical scores, they do not depend on the composer being present to perform them, often blurring the line between artist and audience. (To what degree that’s actually true will be part of our discussion.) A number of these instruction pieces are collected as part of her website; she also regularly tweets instructions that work in the same vein as these early pieces.
Ono met John Cage through her first husband, the Japanese avant-garde composer Ichiyanagi Toshi, who had taken part in Cage’s seminar on Experimental Composition at the New School (along with a host of others who would become important to the Downtown Scene). She made her loft space on Chambers Street available for early experimental performances and loosely affiliated with Fluxus artists, based more or less in SoHo, who also operated under Cage’s influence. (The MoMA blog just last week ran a feature on Yoko’s Fluxus wallpaper featuring an imagine from her famous Film No. 4.)
Here’s a fairly recent clip of Ono reading from her instruction pieces:
I can’t remember where I read it, but somewhere I’ve encountered the claim that John Lennon thought of the lyrics to “Imagine” as akin, generically, to Yoko’s instruction pieces, which I suppose makes it appropriate to wrap up this post with Yoko singing that song:
P.S. If we have time at the end of class today, we’ll take a quick field trip to SoHo to see Walter de Maria’s New York Earth Room. This class is turning out to be pretty fun — at least for me!
1:31 a.m.
Ah, New York in the 21st century! Just back from an unexpected excursion into the night, courtesy of a suspicious vehicle parked across the street from NYU’s University Hall. Here’s an account from the Daily News. According to that esteemed paper, it was the fourth scare since the failed bombing attempt in Times Square.
UPDATE
1:36 a.m.
The latest from the New York Post. Perhaps the guy was catching the Buzzcocks over at Irving Plaza.
FURTHER UPDATE
7:22 a.m.
Buzzcocks, it was. According to the Daily News:
As it turned out, the Buzzcocks played a role in ending the alarm. Concertgoers who came streaming out of the Fillmore New York at Irving Plaza said the band stopped the show to make an announcement for police.
“They stopped in the middle of the song and said, ‘Does anyone have a 1991 Cutlass?’” said Shari Newman, 32.
I think I will, actually, make it out of my neighborhood this weekend. There’s a show I hope to catch in Williamsburg on Saturday. So there — I’m not a lazy downtowner 100% of the time.
What else is going on in the Greater New York blogosphere?
Some are asking: Could the closed-off Harlem River High Bridge be uptown’s future High Line Park? [Harlem Bespoke]
Did Cinco de Mayo leave you wanting more Mexican food? Here’s a rundown on some options in Queens. [The Foodista]
Tickets are now on sale for Brooklyn Hip Hop Festival (July 5-10). [Brooklyn Bodega]
Coming even sooner … Bronx Week (May 12-23). [Norwood News]
Richmond Terrace, Staten Island, then and now. [Ape Shall Not Kill Ape]
Photo of Harlem River High Bridge from Harlem Bespoke.
Tags: Bronx, Brooklyn, Harlem, outer boroughs, Queens, Staten Island
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